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performance program

2026

In August–September 2026, the new season of the Performance Program will take place—a two-month series of more than twenty performances, lectures, seminars, and discussions held across Kyiv and Lviv.

Launched last year, the programme now expands across two cities, creating a platform for exchange between the artistic communities of Kyiv and Lviv. The Lviv programme is co-organised by Jam Factory Art Center, while the Kyiv programme is produced by thesteinstudio in partnership with the Ukrainian-Danish Youth House. The project was initiated by artist Olga Stein, with Valeriia Buradzhyieva serving as the programme curator.

Over the course of two months, the programme will premiere new works by Ukrainian artists, including the collectives of Hannah Vinogradova and Nastya Dzyuban, Verkhovynets Archive, and Tanz Laboratorium + t. t. t. acting group. Their projects explore a wide range of themes, from rethinking the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Les Kurbas, to seeking alternative representations of Ukrainian folk dance, and imagining a speculative cultural institution that merges the aesthetics of burlesque, club culture, and theatrical spectacle.

As part of the partnership with Jam Factory Art Center, two days of the Kyiv programme at thesteinstudio will be dedicated to the phenomenon of Lviv performance art. The programme will feature performances by Volodymyr Kaufman, Andrii Helitovych, Mykhailo Barabash, and Anastasiia Prozora, alongside a lecture by co-curator Yaryna Shumska, presenting her research on the history of performance art in Lviv.

While last year's edition focused exclusively on Ukrainian artists, this year's programme expands into an international format. International participants include Rachel Tess (USA/Sweden), who will present a choreographic work and speak about her experience curating Swedish–Ukrainian performance residencies; Ivana Müller (Croatia/France), who will present her performance in a delegated format and give an online lecture on the possibilities and limitations of participation; and Florian Malzacher (Germany), who will give a presentation followed by a Q&A on curatorial practices in performance.

Beyond presenting new works, the programme fosters critical dialogue between artists, curators, researchers, and audiences through public discussions and artist talks accompanying the performances in the public programme. As part of the educational strand, programme curator Valeriia Buradzhyieva will lead introductory seminars in Performance Studies for teenagers in both Kyiv and Lviv.

The programme is intended both for cultural practitioners and researchers working with performance, and for broader audiences interested in contemporary art. Detailed information about each event will be available in its individual announcement.

Volodymyr Kaufman

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Untitled
thesteinstudio, Kyiv
7 August
18:00

...space, sound, time—
phenomena that cannot truly be grasped.
Perhaps that is why we rely
on various conventions to capture them:
clocks, musical notation, square metres.
We do not live in the real world,
but in the fictions we create about it,
and perhaps
that is what saves humanity from madness.

...I try to enter sound
through an emotional vision,
while remaining aware
of its incomprehensibility.
I create within it; it is mine.
If someone asks me what it is,
I will answer:
I knew what it was
until you asked me about it...

Volodymyr Kaufman (b. 1957) was born in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine. He is a performance artist, painter, graphic artist, theatre scenographer, curator, and co-founder and artistic director of the Dzyga Art Association (1993) and the Institute of Actual Art in Lviv (2007).

He studied at the Lviv College of Applied and Decorative Arts (graduating in 1978) and at the Faculty of Architecture of Lviv Polytechnic (1978–1980).

Kaufman is the author of numerous exhibitions, performances, and interdisciplinary projects presented in Ukraine and internationally. Since 2002, he has been developing several long-term artistic projects, including Quotes for Nests, Ecotheatre, Fish Therapy, Bird Therapy, and Wounds.

Mykhailo Barabash

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Potato

thesteinstudio, Kyiv
8 August
16:00

Performance continues the artist's four-year-long research project, in which the potato occupies a central place. Here, it emerges as a symbol of accumulated generational experience, of life and survival, and of everyday resistance—a means of overcoming obstacles and enduring through adversity.

Mykhailo Barabash (b. 1980) was born in Ternopil and lives and works in Lviv. An interdisciplinary artist and curator, he works across new media, installation, performance, land art, and graphic arts.

He studied Monumental Painting at the Lviv National Academy of Arts. He was awarded the Gaude Polonia scholarship by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland in 2011 and 2016.

Barabash is a co-founder and member of the NURT Art Association, curator of the TETRAMATYKA Biennale of Audiovisual Art, and curator of the Sacred Space art project (2012–2020). He has participated in numerous Ukrainian and international exhibitions and festivals, including CONTEXTS (Poland, 2018), Ukrainian Cross-Section (Lviv, Wrocław, Lublin, 2019), and the LIVE project (2022), presented at Documenta 15 and ZK/U in Kassel, Germany. He is also a co-founder and lecturer at the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at the Lviv National Academy of Arts.

Anastasiia Prozora

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Get Winded
thesteinstudio, Kyiv

8 August
16:45

Performance is a bodily experiment with dough—smooth, sticky, soft, and warm, yet at the same time elastic and gradually hardening.

Anastasiia Prozora (b. 1999) was born in Mykolaiv and lives and works in Lviv. Working across performance, video, and installation, she explores themes of corporeality, personal memory, and collective memory.

She studied at the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at the Lviv National Academy of Arts and participated in the Erasmus+ programme at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

Prozora has participated in numerous Ukrainian and international art projects, including Resilience and As Long as You Stand by Me, as well as the Performance Art Days in Lviv, 13festivalen in Sweden, and FNAF in Prague, Czech Republic.

Andrii Helytovych

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Cage
thesteinstudio, Kyiv

8 August
17:45

At the core of the work is a radical reduction of physical space. Drawing on the work of Mykhail Semenko, the performer constructs the piece as a rhythmic interplay between body, space, and voice.

Andrii Helytovych (b. 1989) was born in Lviv, where he lives and works. His artistic practice focuses on durational performance, collective action, and interventions in public space. His works emerge through the interplay of three key contexts: place, time, and interaction with the audience.

He graduated from the Ivan Trush Lviv Professional College of Decorative and Applied Arts and the Department of Monumental Painting at the Lviv National Academy of Arts.

A recipient of the Gaude Polonia scholarship (2017), Helytovych has participated in numerous performance festivals and artist residencies in Ukraine and abroad, including the Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy), BIFPA'23 (Northern Ireland), and Interakcje in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland. He is a co-founder and co-organiser of the international performance festival Zabih (The Race), held in Lviv in 2018 and 2019.

Yaryna Shumska

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Lecture
The Spacetime of Lviv and the History of Its Performance Art

thesteinstudio, Kyiv

8 August
14:00

The lecture explores the history and distinct characteristics of performance art in Lviv, tracing how the city's spaces have, over decades, become—and continue to serve as—sites of artistic expression.

A stadium, a park, a lake, a street, a church, a museum and a "non-museum," a traffic island, an apartment—these are just some of the places that preserve the memory of little-known or long-forgotten performances. Embedded in these sites are stories of the people, permissions, and prohibitions that shaped the development of performance art in the city. The lecture will examine the structures of these events, as well as the continuities and transformations that define Lviv's performance history.

Yaryna Shumska (b. 1989) was born in Lviv, where she lives and works. She is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, curator, and lecturer. Through performance, painting, installation, and video, she explores the notion of presence as expressed through the body and the visual traces it creates—presence as both spoken and unspoken, articulated and left between the lines.

She graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts (LNAA) and was awarded the Gaude Polonia scholarship of the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage in 2013. She is the author of numerous solo exhibitions and artistic projects and has participated in exhibitions, conferences, and performance festivals across Ukraine, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She is a co-founder of the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at LNAA (2018), and co-organiser and co-curator of the School of Performance (2019), the online residency On Site and Performance Archive. Ukraine (2020), as well as the Lviv Performance Art Days, organised in collaboration with the Czech Festival of Naked Forms (2024–2026).

The lecture belongs to a programme strand dedicated to researching Lviv's performance art history, curated by Yaryna Shumska. The strand also includes performances by Vlodko Kaufman (7 August), and Andrii Helytovych, Anastasiia Prozora, and Mykhailo Barabash (all on 8 August).

Hannah Vinogradova & Nastia Dziuban

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The New Ukrainian Burlesque

Zorianyi Nosorih Strip Club
Lesia Ukrainka Str. 34, Kyiv
10 August
18:00 – 21:00
Audience can come and leave at any time.

69 Strip Club
Shevska str. 12, Lviv
14:00-17:00
14–15 August
Audience can come and leave at any time.

This summer, after a long separation, old friends Kevin and Margot reunite to realise their dream of opening a club dedicated to leisure and culture. Somewhere between the erotic and the divine, the spectacular and the ordinary, the club opens its doors for a trial run. Reserve your table and become part of the birth of a new burlesque shaped by the spirit of the times.

Hannah Vinogradova is a performer and choreographer who creates solo works as well as collaborative performances. Her artistic practice draws on autoethnography, contemporary dance, and pole dance. Born and raised in Donetsk, she has lived and worked in Kyiv since 2014.

Nastia Dziuban is an artist working across dance, choreography, and performance. Born in Kyiv, she currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2015, she has been creating performative works, primarily in collaboration with close friends and colleagues. Her practice explores the intersections of theatrical and choreographic apparatuses, as well as collective and participatory artistic forms. Her work engages with themes of migration, memory, and community-making. In 2021, she was a danceWEB scholarship recipient, and in 2023 she completed an MA in Choreography and Performance in Giessen, Germany. Nastia works as an independent artist, choreographer, dancer, performer, dramaturg, organiser, educator, social assistant, and more.

Mentor: Mariam Agamian

The project was created as part of the third cycle of the Scattered Communities programme, implemented by Insha Osvita in cooperation with Assortment Room and the Antonin Artaud Fellowship, with the support of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

TanzLaboratorium + t.t.t. acting group

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Angel of History at the Ball of Victims

Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv

18 August
19:00

A dance performance that transports Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" from the catastrophes of the twentieth century to the uncanny spectacle of the Balls of Victims—a series of post-Revolutionary masquerade balls said to have taken place in late eighteenth-century France. The work explores the intersection of Benjamin's philosophy of history and Les Kurbas's philosophy of theatre, opening a space for reflection on historical responsibility and the transformative potential of art.

The piece is built on the premise that the present moment is vertical: it contains all times simultaneously, and action becomes truly effective—performative—only when a person approaches their own limits and is able to turn toward themselves, just as the Angel of History turns its face toward the past. The Balls of Victims—whose historical authenticity remains uncertain to this day—become an image of the impossibility of escaping the feeling that we are dancing on the bones of murdered ancestors.

What if you are, at once, an angel, a ruin, and a dancer?

The performance is dedicated to Walter Benjamin and his philosophy of history, as well as to Les Kurbas and his philosophy of theatre.

The project was created in collaboration between the independent performance groups TanzLaboratorium and t.t.t. acting group. While TanzLaboratorium has existed for more than twenty-five years, t.t.t. acting group was founded only a year ago by graduates of theatre and art programmes.

TanzLaboratorium is an independent research collective founded in 2001 by choreographer and educator Larysa Venedyktova. The group approaches art as a life process activated through performativity. Its artistic strategy lies in investigating the spaces between contemporary artistic forms while dismantling established artistic and linguistic conventions. Within the collective's practice, the body functions simultaneously as the author of the image and as a critical agent of thought. Selected works include PostUkrainian Body (2013), Headless (2017), and Unsurpassable Disaster (2022).

t.t.t. acting group is an artistic collective established in 2025 within a student environment as a platform for experimentation and for exploring the human body in the context of contemporary art. Selected works include Private Anthropology 18+ (2025) and Beckett Fest (2025).

Florian Malzacher

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presentation + public talk

Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv
18August
18:00

The renewed interest in theatre as a public space, and in its political potential, has brought into focus the unique capacity of the performing arts to create temporary communities: not only to reflect society, but also to experiment with social and political processes in which societies, in their various forms, can be conceived, played out, performed, staged, tested or even invented.

Almost in parallel with this, however, the concept of assembly has come under severe pressure for various reasons. The pandemic, war, aggressive struggles for cultural hegemony and the almost global rise of the far right confront us with the question: how can theatre, how can art still be used for assemblies that offer space for radical imagination as well as for pragmatic utopias?

The presentation will be followed by a public talk on curatorial practices in performance.

Florian Malzacher is a curator, writer, as well as professor for dramaturgy and curatorial practice at the Karlsruhe University of Design and Arts. His books and essays have been translated into more than fifteen languages, including The Art of Assembly. Political Theatre Today (2023).

Per Forma

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Public Presentation of the Grant Program Per Forma

thesteinstudio, Kyiv

27 August
17:00

During the session, the Per Forma team—Kateryna Alymova and Khrystyna Melnyk—will present the grant programme and share practical guidance on preparing a successful grant application. Participants will learn how to develop a realistic project budget, avoid common mistakes, and navigate the key requirements of grant competitions. The session will also address communication strategies for artistic projects, including how to effectively communicate your work, engage audiences, and present project outcomes.

Per Forma is a grant programme supporting the development of performance art in Ukraine by fostering the creation of new works, the professional development of artists, and international collaboration. The programme is implemented by Kyiv Contemporary Music Days (KCMD).

Kateryna Alymova is a cultural manager, producer, curator, and co-founder of Kyiv Contemporary Music Days (KCMD). For more than fifteen years, she has worked in cultural management, international cooperation, and the development of contemporary music. She has produced educational, concert, and interdisciplinary projects across Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States. Previously, she headed the Professional Development Programme at House of Europe and served as director of the international experimental and electroacoustic music festival Jauna Muzika in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is a Fulbright and Edmund S. Muskie Fellow and holds an MA in Music Business from the University of Miami (USA).

Khrystyna Melnyk is a PR specialist, communications professional, and journalist. She is the Head of Communications at Kyiv Contemporary Music Days (KCMD). With over ten years of experience across the media, civil society, and business sectors, she leads KCMD's strategic communications, including those for the Per Forma grant programme. Previously, she served as Programme Assistant for the USAID RADA: Next Generation initiative, where she coordinated the civic education component in collaboration with the structural units of the Secretariat of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, including the Educational Centre, the Research Service, and the Press Service. Earlier in her career, she worked as an international affairs correspondent and journalist at Suspilne, and as a copywriter at the advertising agency AdBakers. She also served as PR Manager for the inaugural Kyiv Contemporary Music Days Festival in 2015, the contemporary opera IYOV, and a number of other cultural projects. Khrystyna is a graduate of the Institute of Journalism at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Ivana Müller

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We Are Still Watching

28 August
Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv
19:00

30 August
Ukrainian-Danish Youth House
18:00

As the familiar distinctions between audience and performer shift, the theatre becomes a space where stories emerge through encounters, decisions, and acts of imagination. Without prescribing a single way of participating, the work invites each gathering to discover its own dynamics, making every presentation unique.

We Are Still Watching unfolds as a reflection on how a temporary community comes into being—and what remains of it once the performance is over. Ivana Müller turns the act of watching into a question rather than a given, opening a space where attention itself becomes one of the performance's central materials.

Premiered in 2012, We Are Still Watching has been presented extensively at leading theatres and festivals across Europe and North America, including HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Festival d'Automne (Paris), New York Live Arts, and the Venice Biennale.

The performance will be followed by Ivana Müller’s online lecture about participation as an artistic method (2 September) where the audience of We Are Still Watching will be able to ask the author questions about the piece as well as share their impressions. The lecture is free for attendance, registration required via the link.

Ivana Müller is a Croatian-born, Paris-based artist, choreographer, and writer. Over the last 25 years, she has developed a substantial body of work that is often undisciplined, formally innovative, and deeply collaborative. Her oeuvre encompasses stage works, performances, audiovisual pieces, and texts, presentedinternationally across the fields of dance, theatre, and visual arts.

Ivana Müller

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Lecture on the practices of commons and participation as method

online
time TBA

In this virtual lecture, Ivana Müller will discuss her artistic practice, with a particular focus on participation and the notions of the collective and the commons—ideas she has explored through a wide range of forms and formats over the past two decades. Drawing on her experience as an artist, choreographer, and writer, she will reflect on
the relevance and significance of artistic practices within broader socio-political contexts, and on their capacity to sustain and nurture possibilities for humanism in contemporary society.

The lecture will also be an opportunity for the audience of We Are Still Watching to discuss the piece with the author. You can participate in the mentioned performance on August 28 in Lviv (Jam Factory Art Center, free entrance, registration required at the link) and in Kyiv on August 30 (Ukrainian-Danish Youth House, free entrance registration required at the link).

Ivana Müller is a Croatian-born, Paris-based artist, choreographer, and writer. Over the last 25 years, she has developed a substantial body of work that is often undisciplined, formally innovative, and deeply collaborative. Her oeuvre encompasses stage works, performances, audiovisual pieces, and texts, presentedinternationally across the fields of dance, theatre, and visual arts.

Verkhovynets’ Archivе

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Theory [and Practice] of Ukrainian Folk Dance + artist talk

Ukrainian-Danish Youth House, Kyiv

5 September
18:00

A group of dancers studies and reconstructs archives of Ukrainian folk stage dance, unpacking its terminology, practices, and histories while reflecting on their own place within this tradition and their relationship to it. Theory [and Practice] of Ukrainian Folk Dance engages with the creative legacy of Vasyl Verkhovynets—an actor, composer, conductor, choreographer, and folklorist who was among the first to theorize the adaptation of folk dance for the stage, before being persecuted during the Soviet terror of the 1930s.

The group's work emerged in response to a growing demand, both within and beyond the folk stage dance community, for a rethinking of the present practices. Rather than rushing to "modernize" folk and folk stage dance or produce new forms, the group proposes returning to older ones: reconstructing historical choreographies, exploring their historical contexts, and opening up a broader conversation around these processes.

The collective Verkhovynets’ Archive was initiated in 2025. Its members are Daria Aleksieva, Mykyta Bolohov, Oleksandra Delikatna, Olena Dudka, Anna Kaliuzhna, Yaryna Levchenko, Andrii Miakhkyi, Vasyl Plekhov, Chantseva Daria, Kateryna Shponko.

Valeriia Schiller & Zhenia Stepanenko

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Cancelled Love

Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv

18 September
19:00

There were three of them…

The first was hailed as a genius. A prophet. A legend of contemporary art… He did not paint—he seduced the canvas, arousing it with the touch of his brush… He conquered biennials like Prometheus in the Trojan War. His works brought critics to orgasm and his rivals to tears of envy…

The second was a masterful lover, a noble prince from a powerful art dynasty. He was no less intelligent, knowledgeable, or intellectually gifted than the self-made artists, and his most formidable weapon was his beauty…

The third, though not blessed with exceptional looks, fought fiercely for the rights of every lover in his harem. In royal chambers and in tents at land art festivals alike, they loved one another against the will of a world that refused to recognize their right to love freely…

Will these lovers survive the hardships of artists' residencies and the treachery of behind-the-scenes intrigues? Will their passion endure every trial that fate has in store for them? And can an artist remain an artist when the body says "yes" while the mind pleads "no"?...

Step into a world of erotic stories where no one dreams of finding themselves…

The authors of the duo, Zhenia Stepanenko (b. 1996, Kyiv) and Valeriia Shiller (b. 1994, Sevastopol), were fascinated by forbidden literature from an early age… At their school desks, during breaks between classroom duties, in after-school care, at saxophone lessons, between wushu practice and beadwork classes, they secretly devoured their grandmothers' romance novellas. Their insatiable desire to uncover the mysteries of adult pleasures illuminated the path toward their true calling. Zhenya and Valeriia abandoned their artistic and curatorial practices and finally devoted themselves to writing an erotic novella set in the world of contemporary art.

This project was selected as a recipient of the Per Forma grant programme, implemented by Kyiv Contemporary Music Days (KCMD) with the support of the Performing Arts Fund NL and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands to foster the development of the performing arts sector in Ukraine.
#PerFormaKCMD

Rachel Tess

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The Last and Stepping Stones + artist talk

Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv

26 September
15:00

Rachel Tess will present her two dance titles as well as talk about her artistic practice and vast experience of curating the Swedish-Ukrainian performance residencies.

The Last
Who has the right to be celebrated, where are they celebrated, and who bears witness? The Last is a quasi dys/utopian Gala Des Étoiles originally staged in a defunct shoe factory. It is a celebration of dancing, dancers, and personal dance histories. Gala’s are usually the fodder of the wealthy and privileged - reserved for the La Scalas, Paris Operas, and American Ballet Theaters of the world and the elite ticket holders who can pay the price.
What occurs if we frame an experimental dance performance as a gala and replace the pomp and circumstance with attention to time, the wherewithal to sustain, and perseverance in the face of conservatism? What if instead of touring the world’s stages and grand opera houses it occurs and re-occurs like an ever-present grinding, steaming locomotive always chugging, always insisting in one place with many corners to travel to?
Choreography, concept and dance: Rachel Tess
Sound: Uli Ruchlinski
Costumes: Jesse Lackowitz Crozier

Stepping Stones
Stepping stones as symbols and metaphors—dance as a passage into imagination and poetics. Dancer Rachel Tess excavates, builds mountains, and transforms into molten lava in a new solo performance by choreographer Anna Pehrsson.
Music by Mårten Spångberg

Rachel Tess is an American choreographer and dancer living and working in Sweden. She is the director of Milvus Artistic Research Center in Knislinge and was the associate curator for Live Art at Wanås Konst between 2016-2022. She received a BFA in 2004 from The Juilliard School in New York City. In 2013, she received her masters in choreography from the New Performative Practices Masters program at DOCH. She is the recipient of the 2019 Birgit Cullberg stipendium and the 2023 Region Skåne culture prize for her work with new modes of production for dance in the countryside. Her choreographic work has been presented throughout Scandinavia as well as the United States and she held a permanent contract with Cullbergbaletten between 2009-2013.